The arrival of the new White Smoke software, a computer programme that is said to turn "prosaic dunces into lyrical poets", has apparently been met with great enthusiasm. The software, featuring separate stylistic modes including legal, medical and even "creative" English, vows to be able to improve anything from a tax return to a love letter by drawing upon millions of examples of well-written English and applying their lessons to the frustrated writer's own efforts.

In the written equivalent of a football hooligan being transformed into the top-hatted Monopoly Man, its makers claim White Smoke renders prose more "sophisticated." All well and good for the happy recipients of its wisdom, but considering that White Smoke is said to be the first programme of its type, where might computer generated writing be in thirty years?

While the current programme only "improves" bad prose, rather than writing autonomously, it is surely possible to imagine a strange Terminator-esque future in which computers generate literature as proficiently as humans. It wouldn't be the first time that a machine managed against all expectations to outperform a living person. It was once believed that a computer could never defeat a chess grand master, but IBM's Deep Blue machine finally defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997. Could a computer one day end up out-writing a famous novelist?

One could picture a sweating Philip Roth, hunched over a table in a secret monitor-filled laboratory, frantically trying to out-write the latest hi-tech literary T-1000. After the final full stop had been placed a panel would retreat into a hotel room and bitch furiously until a unanimous decision was reached. In the event of a tie, the (human) writer would receive money and the computer, I presume, would receive a lifetime supply of free electricity.

Advancing even further into this dystopian vision, could the future not potentially see a computer being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature? Surely if in the year 2048 a seminal troupe of Left Bank dwelling Lit-bots produced far better work than the humans, the academy would be forced to act, in spite of the potential for speeches of the teary eyed "I'd just like to thank my programmer" variety.

As a last thought, what would White Smoke make of our most revered but idiosyncratic prose stylists? Would Joyce's "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed" be stripped down to "Buck Mulligan, a fat man, descended the stairs holding his razor with confidence"? Or would Hemingway end up being plumped out with layers of unnecessary adjectives and pronouns? Come to think of it, is there an author who could do with being run through the White Smoke software? Or one who reads like he or she already has been?